"And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche."

[gurdymonkey]

"What is your preferred way to experience learning?" asks moira_ramsay ? 

I figured I'd answer here because this is going to be lengthy. The short answer is: "It depends."

Different people process information differently. My grandmother was a crossword whiz and she had an 8th grade education. My father has a Ph.D. in English with a vocabulary to match and he cannot solve a crossword puzzle to save his life. I know extremely bright people who can't read a map but can find their way if you give them directions and landmarks to follow.

I'm lucky. I can absorb written material and,  judging from the success of my website, am reasonably good at writing how-to instructions as well. (OK, the concept of collar attachment seems to be where people get tripped up. One of these days I will find the combination of words and pictures that makes the light bulb go on for more of them.)

I'm also pretty good at hands-on learning, figuring out which piece goes where, and how things work, even if there are spectacular conceptual failures along the way: I consider these part of the learning process. I pretty much taught myself to sew this way. In fact a great many of my "I-need-that" SCA projects involve trying to make something, often without ever having tried to make something like it before.

I've got a good ear for aural information and a good memory, which is why I'm indifferent at sight-reading music but I pick up pieces by ear pretty readily. This also helped when I was studying Spanish and French on a regular basis. I'm rusty now, but I still surprise myself at how much I can pick up when I hear dialogue in a foreign film or roll past a Spanish broadcast. If I used another language on a regular basis, I'd get it back pretty quickly.

When it comes to physical skills such as riding a horse, or most recently, learning taiko, I have to work at it, however, I make up for lack of natural physical skill with being able to watch the physical dynamics of someone else doing it, break their process down, then try to imitate it.

I'm with Chaucer's Clerk of Oxenford, as I sit here in a pair of khakis that are about to disintegrate while surrounded by a small fortune in books.  Glad to learn and glad to teach.

I discovered I could teach, really teach,  in my teens. My trainer decided I was ready to start working with beginner children and started booking them for lessons with me. At first I pretty much taught based on how I'd been taught. As time went on and Scott started giving me more students with varied skills, I started thinking about why certain instructions did or didn't work with different students. Were they confident? Afraid? Comfortable? Balanced? Did they understand what I was telling them to do? Did they understand why doing it should produce a particular result? What makes the light bulb go on for a person who has no idea what "correct" feels like? 

What makes the light bulb go on?  Do I need to position your hands or legs? Do I need to say "lift your toes" instead of "heels down?" 

Do I need to rewrite the way I explained how to attach that collar? Do I need to stand next to you and play that phrase so you can imitate my drum strokes along with me instead of being confused by watching me when I'm facing you and your right is my left?

What makes the light bulb go on?

I must thank James for mentioning a book title about shooting pictures with an iPhone. Truly, the best camera IS the one that's with you. Mine isn't built into a steroidal cell phone, but it does fit in my purse and I try to keep it with me these days in case opportunities present themselves. On a whim I decided to head over to taiko a few minutes early and see if there was any interesting weather/sunset worth shooting on Alameda Point. I was lucky enough to run across several brown pelicans who were enjoying themselves over the old seaplane lagoon. I told myself they were too far away. I told myself they were moving too quickly. I figured what the hell and shot about 20 frames anyway just for grins.

Comments

[la-peregrina.livejournal.com]

When it comes to physical skills such as riding a horse, or most recently, learning taiko, I have to work at it, however, I make up for lack of natural physical skill with being able to watch the physical dynamics of someone else doing it, break their process down, then try to imitate it.

Up until a few years ago when I saw a car commercial with Asian women taiko artists playing in the background, I thought that the practice was limited only to men. When was that particular barrier breached? I am fascinated.

[gurdymonkey.livejournal.com]

I think that was Hono O Daiko in that commercial and they were founded in 1986 according to their website.

Any taiko you've seen performed in the United States can be traced directly to Seichi Tanaka, who studied under Daihachi Oguchi, who got HIS start as a jazz drummer. Oh, here, I wrote all this up awhile ago.
http://www.wodefordhall.com/taiko.htm

ANYWAY, I'm honestly not certain how much of a barrier there was. There is certainly evidence that women played hand drums fairly early on. This 12th century scroll shows two women playing at a feast, one on koto, the other singing and beating a drum (look for a black ring beneath the layered sleeves of the figure at the far right).
http://www.tnm.go.jp/gallery/search/images/max/C0016933.jpg
These tzuzumi are rope tensioned "talking" drums that can change pitch if the player squeezes or releases the ropes while striking the head. They are also often depicted in the hands of geisha in later periods.

While films are not evidence of much of anything, there is a scene in Ten To Chi (Heaven and Earth) in which taiko are played by shrine maidens being borne on giant palanquins at a 16th c. battle. (They get elegantly massacred, of course.) We do know taiko were used for ritual and military purposes in period, as well as for festivals. Whether women played them? I don't know. The drummers in this festival scene all appear to be male:
http://www.tnm.go.jp/gallery/search/images/max/C0022476.jpg
Note that most of them are playing small drums except for one guy at the left on the o-daiko (literally "Great Drum").

With taiko being revived in the US in the 20th century, any barriers that may have existed had to come down. If you're bringing a new art to a city that never had it, you want people to come play, right? I think there may have been some old school attitudes that women could not play o-daiko, but they're pretty much gone. Sacramento Taiko Dan's Tiffany Tamaribuchi (an SF Taiko alum, I think) plays as aggressively as any man and she led an all female cohort from her dojo at last year's International Taiko Festival in Berkeley in some of the evening's most entertaining pieces.

I think the car commercial was filmed with Hono O Daiko and those women have been playing together since the mid 1980s.

[sengokudaimyo.livejournal.com]

The very first record I bought when I lived in Japan was an LP of taiko music by the Masakado Daiko, an all-woman taiko group attached to the Kanda Jinja. They seem to have had a pretty long history.

[gurdymonkey.livejournal.com]

So about the taiko maidens in Ten To Chi, any idea where they got that? I'm always on the look out for taiko history tidbits....